Hope of Jubilee: The Last Word in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

1-2 Chronicles, ‘the last word in the Hebrew Bible’, dramatises the eschatology of the 'Holiness Code' in Leviticus in terms of the history of the human race. Under the three-fold coaxial pyramids of Adam, the first father of the human race, Noah, the second, and Abraham, ‘the father of a multitude of nations’, Israel's history is ushered in to stand centrally as offering the definitive solution to the human condition. Israel is destined to live a life of holiness, i.e., of rendering to God all that is due to him. But the history of Israel as monarchy is one of failure to realise the ideal portrayed in the reign of Solomon. The messiah of the house of David has to be subordinated to the primary model of the ideal relationship with God expressed through Torah. It is the Torah of Jubilee, as expounded in Leviticus 25–26, that offers Israel the hope of definitive Return to the land in the eschaton, acknowledged by the human race as through the edict of Cyrus (2 Ch. 36:22–23). The Chronicler exploits this theology in a number of ways: through the thematic term ma' al ('failure to accord God his due') and atonement made for it, as in the ' asham (‘reparation-offering’) (cf. Lv. 5:14–26; 26:40); the couching of the edict of Cyrus in terms of the proclamation of Jubilee (2 Ch. 36:22; cf. Lv.25:9); the casting of human history into 50 generations (10 from Adam to Noah; 10 from Shem to Abraham; 29 from Isaac to Josiah, with whom, for the Chronicler, the exile begins). The fiftieth, ‘exilic’, generation, of unlimited duration, is that to whom the Jubilee of definitive eschatological Return is proclaimed. Proleptic anticipation of that Return is expressed through the life of Torah, including the practice of the ‘lesser jubilees’ of debt cancellation.